There seem to be a few Terry Pratchett fans on advogato.
I haven't
got the time to read all the diaries here, but at least mjs, stephane and
dria have referred to him or his
books.

For those who don't know him yet, PTerry (as he's usually
called on
alt.fan.pratchett or alt.books.pratchett because of
Pyramids) is
mostly known for his Discworld books, a series of at
the moment
24 volumes of comic fantasy. The first few were just fantasy
parodies,
the newer have grown into their own special brand of comic
fantasy.

I'm not much of a Fantasy fan in general, although I read
and liked
Tolkien, but the Discworld isn't really Fantasy somehow. It
has lots of
popular science and technology terms strewn in like
"trouserlegs of
time", "quantum" and the rubbersheet model of gravity. Then
there's Hex,
a computer built with among other things an ant-farm
(complete with
"Anthill inside" sticker) in the High-Energy-Magic building
in Unseen
University. One sentence I particularly liked in Witches
Abroad
is "The witches flew along a maze of twisty little canyons,
all
alike"...

Photogenics

Another beta of a commercial graphics program was
released on
Monday, this time it was Photogenics, a
pixel oriented
painting program. I downloaded and tried this one as well.

The archive was amazingly small (ca. 360K) but that seems
to be
mostly because it's a very limited demo/beta version. It
only has very
few import filters, only one export filter (jpg), and many
of the
painting modes are not available.

The UI seems to some bugs (e.g. popups pop up in the
wrong position
and you can't use them correctly) but the program appears to
be very
stable and fast.

So far, I haven't seen anything that you couldn't do with
Gimp,
although drawing new images seems to be easier in
Photogenics, but I'm
not much of an artist, so that's not all that important to
me.

There are two things that I find interesting in
Photogenics. One is
the way drawing is handled. Drawing effectively selects
pixels and
applies an affect to the selection. The two stages are
actually
completely separate. You can change the effect thats applied
even after
you've finished drawing. That's pretty neat and I think GIMP
should have
something similar.

The other interesting thing is how undoing drawing works.
Photogenics
doesn't just save the pixels that were affected, it
remembers the actual
strokes you did with what tool and settings. This has the
big advantage
that it takes less memory but it also means that undoing a
stroke can
take very long because all previous strokes have to be
repeated.

It'll be interesting to see how Photogenics can compete
against GIMP
and PhotoPaint which Corel wants to make available for free
download.

Diaries

schoen, your diary entries
are
beautiful[1] and I for one like to read them. They tend to
be quite
long, but I don't mind. Nobody's got to read them if they
don't find the
time. And even on the recent diaries page, its easy to skim
over it.

On licenses and requirements to comply with applicable
laws: isn't
that requirement always implicitly present? I mean,
copyright and
contracts are regulated by law and laws can state that
certain clauses
in contracts or license agreements are not applicable even
when they are
written into the contract/license.

Of course, there might be differences in this regard in
different
parts of the world. But that's a more general topic. It's
not
immediately clear that a license that was written with US
law in mind
also works as intended with, say European law. Anybody
interested in how
compatible the GNU General Public License in praticular is
to German and
European law should have a look at the current issue of c't
or at IfROSS (Institut für
Rechtsfragen
in der Open Source Software)

Feetnotes:

[1]Well, OK, I probably have to explain this pun[2]. The
German word
for beautiful is "schön" and if no "ö" (o umlaut)
is available
it can be replaced with "oe".

[2]That's something PTerry's German translator likes to
do sometimes
even when it's not necessary. In Reaper Man, for
instance,
there's the following exchange between Windle Poons (a
recently deceased
Wizard who can't pass into after life because Death has been
retired...)
and the Librarian (who was turned into an orang-utan by a
magical
accident):

'Olé'
'Oook?'
'No, Not "with milk".'

In the german translation theres a second sentence in the
last line:
'You mean "au lait"' (In the German version it's in German,
of course
:-)). Aaaarrrgggghhh. I'm glad I read it only after the
English original
and that it was the only Pratchett translation I read. I was
just
curious how good the translation was. The other volumes
don't seem to be
much different.